Your personal information is definitely very precious to you, which is why you should take all the possible and necessary steps to prevent any kind of personal information from getting stolen or abused. Passwords are one sensitive area which we have had to talk about in recent memory, and unfortunately for those who use Google’s Chrome web browser, you run the danger of having your user passwords exposed, “courtesy” of a security flaw within the Chrome browser itself. In a nutshell, this particular flaw would enable just about anyone who is able to gain access to a user’s computer in order to check out the slew of stored passwords straight from the settings panel itself.
Credit to software developer Elliott Kember for discovering this when he was importing his bookmarks from Apple’s Safari browser to Google Chrome. Kember realized that it was “mandatory” to import saved passwords from one browser to the other, and he did not feel quite right about that. After snooping around, he realized that Google does offer protection for the passwords from being viewed whenever a user is logged in and has Chrome up and running. All one needs to do is head on to the advanced settings page, click on the “Passwords and forms” option, and follow that up with “Manage saved passwords”.
Another way of doing so would be to type “chrome://settings/passwords” into one’s browser search bar, and clicking the ‘show’ button located next to a list of obscured passwords will do accordingly – revealing the passwords in plain text.
Filed in . Read more about Chrome, Google, Password and Security.